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4 books match the query 'Highway planning'
Frontera Freeways
Highway Building and Displacement in El Paso, TexasMiguel Juarez
University of North Texas Press, 2025
Getting Out of the Mud
The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928Martin T. Olliff, Foreword by David O. Whitten
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobiles
Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.
With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s.
Olliff’s study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.
People before Highways
Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City MakingKarilyn Crockett
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
In 1948, inspired by changes to federal law, Massachusetts government officials started hatching a plan to build multiple highways circling and cutting through the heart of Boston, making steady progress through the 1950s. But when officials began to hold public hearings in 1960, as it became clear what this plan would entail—including a disproportionate impact on poor communities of color—the people pushed back. Activists, many with experience in the civil rights and antiwar protests, began to organize.
Linking archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and oral history, Karilyn Crockett in People before Highways offers ground-level analysis of the social, political, and environmental significance of a local anti-highway protest and its lasting national implications. The story of how an unlikely multiracial coalition of urban and suburban residents, planners, and activists emerged to stop an interstate highway is one full of suspenseful twists and surprises, including for the actors themselves. And yet, the victory and its aftermath are undeniable: federally funded mass transit expansion, a linear central city park, and a highway-less urban corridor that serves as a daily reminder of the power and efficacy of citizen-led city making.
The House on Rondo
Debra J Stone
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
A young girl reckons with the demolition of a Black Saint Paul neighborhood to make way for the Interstate in the early 1960s
When thirteen-year-old Zenobia has to leave her friends and spend the summer at Grandma’s while Mama recovers from a stroke, life seems so unfair. But then the eviction letters start arriving throughout her grandparents’ neighborhood, and white men chalk arrows to mark the gas and water lines, and a new world of unfairness unfolds before her. It’s 1963, and Zenobia’s grandparents’ house on Rondo Avenue in Saint Paul—like all the homes in this thriving Black community—is targeted for demolition to make way for the new Interstate Highway 94.
As Zenobia gradually learns about what’s planned for the Rondo neighborhood and what this means for everyone who lives there, she discovers how her story is intertwined with the history of her family, all the way back to Great Grandma Zenobia and the secrets Grandma Essie held close about the reason for her light skin. With the destruction of the neighborhood looming, Zenobia takes a stand on behalf of her community, joining her no-nonsense neighbor, onetime cowgirl Mrs. Ruby Pearl, in a protest and ultimately getting arrested. Though Zenobia is grounded for a month, her punishment seems of little consequence in comparison to what is happening all around her. Even though the demolition continues, she is proud to discover the power and connection in protesting injustice.
The House on Rondo captures the heartbreak, resistance, and resilience that marks a community sacrificed in the name of progress—a “progress” that never seems to favor Black families and neighborhoods and that haunts cities like Saint Paul to this day. As Zenobia learns what can be destroyed and what cannot, her story teaches us that joy, community, and love persist, even amid violence and loss.